


A Promise, Snow-Swept

by wearwind



Series: Verdant Wind [7]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Christmas Fluff, Claude is a Hopeless Romantic, Companion piece to Reaching Out Sunlit, Derdriu is Venice, Duke Riegan is Doge, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, First Kiss, Garreg Mach Masquerade, Gen, Holiday-Appropriate, One-Shot, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Some description of grief and mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28180689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearwind/pseuds/wearwind
Summary: "Do you think,” Byleth asks, her voice impossibly small as she reaches out, traps his hand with hers, and Claude is frozen with more than Fódlan’s ridiculous weather— “he could tell the truth, in the end?”“Your father?” Claude asks, like the fool he is. Byleth shakes her head softly.“Your friend,” she says. “The...habitual truth-omitter.”Or - It's snowing in Garreg Mach, and Claude has a string of hopes and ideas. (A holiday special of sorts.)
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: Verdant Wind [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734619
Comments: 21
Kudos: 89





	A Promise, Snow-Swept

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to [Reaching Out, Sunlit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24555196), although it can be read as an independent piece. CW for some minor character death and some depictions of mourning.

> See! they come,  
> Like a flock of serpent-throated black-plumed swans,  
> With the mandoline, viol, and the drum,  
> Gems afire on arms ungloved,  
> Fluttering fans,  
> Floating mantles like a great moth's streaky vans  
> Such as Veronese loved.
> 
> But behold  
> In their midst a white unruffled swan appear.  
> One strange barge that snowy tapestries enfold,  
> White its tasseled, silver prow.  
> Who is here?  
> Prince of Love in masquerade or Prince of Fear,  
> Clad in glittering silken snow?
> 
> Cheek and chin  
> Where the mask's edge stops are of the hoar-frosts hue,  
> And no eyebeams seem to sparkle from within  
> Where the hollow rings have place.  
> Yon gay crew  
> Seem to fly him, he seems ever to pursue.  
> 'T is our sport to watch the race.
> 
> At his side  
> Stands the goldenest of beauties; from her glance,  
> From her forehead, shines the splendor of a bride,  
> And her feet seem shod with wings,  
> To entrance,  
> For she leaps into a wild and rhythmic dance,  
> Like Salome at the King's.
> 
> 'T is his aim  
> Just to hold, to clasp her once against his breast,  
> Hers to flee him, to elude him in the game.  
> Ah, she fears him overmuch!  
> Is it jest,-  
> Is it earnest? a strange riddle lurks half-guessed  
> In her horror of his touch.
> 
> Emma Lazarus, A _Masque of Venice_

Khalid dreams.

Colours flicker through the dark haze, fog staining with flickers of burgundy and navy, splintering with a sharp white beam from a lantern only just about inched open. The gondola undulates gently, gliding blind through the milk. The Derdriu canals are like nothing he’d ever seen; tall and narrow tunnels of opulent façades, with the floor of the sea and the ceiling of the sky, at once vast and claustrophobic in the thick mist. Water and blueing algae stain the foundations of the townhouses, looming close enough for him to extend his hand, smear the sludge of a long-past flood with gloved fingertips.

Gloves, too – unfamiliar.

He reaches out. It smells, vaguely, of fish and dirt and ancient memory. Different ancient: in Almyra, time shows in dusty dryness, shifting sands, not in the layers upon layers of sediment painted by rising and receding water. He wonders, briefly, what this year’s dreg will leave on the canal walls.

Perhaps some of the gossip that swirls through the waterways of city, about the new heir apparent.

The blind lantern closes, fog encroaching. A light of a pipe flickers at his side instead, smoke mingling with the breath of the canal.

“It’s been a year, today,” his grandfather says. The night air swallows the rest of it: _Since your uncle’s body was found mangled in the forest. Since the one thing that could have ever made me swallow my pride and write to your mother, or else there would not be another Riegan after me to get married to the sea on the Derdriu lagoon._

Khalid hears it nevertheless, used as he is to listening for things people do not say. They have only known each other briefly, but he senses that his grandfather approves; Old Duke Riegan is not one for overtness, either. The dislike of stark truths seems to run in the family.

Just as well. Curious as Khalid can be about Godfrey, his mother’s brother, half his blood, a man whose place he would soon be taking – he knows little about loss, less about grief. He tries out a few angles in his mind, but the words feel stilted, the promise within them unfounded. _I’m so sorry,_ Khalid imagines himself saying, voice weighed with sincerity, _I will do my utmost to do him proud._

“A year, huh,” he says instead, and the air of the lagoon feels moist on his tongue. “Well, if you have thought about it for a year and still decided to bring me here, then it must be a good idea.”

The pipe pops quietly, gondola swaying in the night. The canal widens, opens up, the façades on both sides disappearing, until it is only two of them and the gondoliers in the white, milky vastness: an empty canvas of a world Khalid would soon be learning to sketch, he hopes, to his liking.

 _Fódlan_.

“We’ll see about that, won’t we?” says Duke Riegan, and the gondola knocks against a sodden pier.

Khalid climbs out first, offering a hand to his grandfather. The man hesitates for a second, then takes it; and here is yet another unfamiliar feeling, a sensation of glove against glove, wiry tendons and ever-so-slightly shaky grip on his own palm.

Khalid squeezes back. On the other side of the fog’s curtain, Duke Riegan’s eyes are tired and grieving and unwilling to allow a hope to take root within, but—

The valets swarm around them, collecting the various packs and encrusted trunks his family had loaded on the ship. With more torches to blaze the way, and a blur of white Fódlani faces, he is momentarily blinded. After so much time on water, the ground sways gently under him. But his grandfather strides ahead, towards a doorway open wide, and Khalid follows on wobbly feet like a new-born fawn trudging after the doe: along the shadowed marble colonnade, up the stairway blazing with torches, through the doors above which looms a pair of sprawling golden antlers.

His lip quirks at that. Not unlike wyvern’s horns, he supposes, that line the entrance to his father’s chambers.

And then a hallway opens before him, wide and bright and glittering with jewels. Heavy-set, contained in a way that none of the Almyran architecture could ever be, with portraits of white-faced men and women lining each wall, and Khalid is— he’s suddenly breathless, overwhelmed, because this is really it, this is _it—_

“Master Oswald,” calls the chamberlain, voice booming under the arched ceiling. “And— young master. Welcome home.”

Khalid licks his lips. His heart is pounding in his chest, erratic, as if the two splintered halves of it cannot decide on a single rhythm. His _home_ — his home is to the east, but it’s never been wholly there, either. And this is why he is here.

“Hey,” he says, bowing lightly, and steps into the light, into the sights of the long lines of portraits that observe the dark-skinned whelp with their keen green eyes. His mother’s eyes. “I’m Claude. And what’s your name?”

*

“Claude, _honestly—_ ”

“Mmhm,” he murmurs, peeling his cheek away from the leather-bound tome. There is an imprint on his face, he is more than sure, in the shape of a Crest of Charon and mirrored letters of _Stormbringer: The History of Thunderbrand._ Catherine had kindly agreed to offer the sword for his cross-examination with the Sword of the Creator, and so he has sunk into the history of the Relic, greedily devouring some narrative after a day spent poring over ledgers and field kitchen expenses.

Sunk so deeply, clearly, that he has managed to spend the night within it.

Leonie’s eyes narrow, clearly rounding on the kitchen records he is currently pushing under the pile with a casual elbow. Her shoulders are still dusted with snow, cheeks ruddy from the frost that lingers in the mountains.

“I thought,” she says, “we agreed that I do these.”

They did, and she is doing a good job with what meagre funds they have at their disposal; her resourceful, blunt practicality certainly stretches the Riegan gold further than he himself would. The problem is that Claude’s in need of more _creative_ accounting, if he is to pull off what he needs to pull off.

“Just double-checking something,” he says, and stretches with a painful click of his neck, standing up to glance out of the half-shuttered window. The snow falls heavy and thick over Garreg Mach, veiling the harsh contour of its ruined flanks into softer, kinder lines. Hiding the war for just a brief moment. “What’s the word, Leonie? What’s chased you out of the training grounds at this side of noon?”

“You know,” Leonie says, “it wouldn’t hurt you either to come practice with the rest of us—”

“Can’t have you all learning my tricks,” Claude interjects, winking lazily. That, and the damned cold of this continent is worst in the mornings.

“—and unlike _some,_ I actually try to manage my time efficiently,” she continues over him, flicking him over the head with something greenish and stringy. He lets the first strike land, leans out of the way of the second. “You know what day it is, Claude?”

Claude’s eyes flicker to the calendar mounted over his desk, half-illegible as it is under layers of scribbled code that cover each day. “Fourth of the Lone Moon?”

“Captain Jeralt’s birthday,” Leonie says, somehow managing to turn each syllable into a separate pang of guilt.

Claude straightens up. Aimlessly, he adjusts his cravat, crooked after the night of crushing it against the desk, and smooths the heel of his hand along the imprint on his cheek. His breath, he thinks, is most certainly stale.

“I don’t think I knew that,” he says, after the few moments of stalling run out. Leonie draws her lips up in a tight smile.

“I didn’t think you would,” she says, pushing the green bundle into his chest. It’s a small spray of sweet-smelling, pink flowers, tiny and clustered at the top of long greyish stems. Claude takes them reflexively, recognising the cloying smell of valerian from his poison work. “Listen— you probably know better whether she’d like space today, or company. I’ve already paid my own respects. But if she needs us...” She pauses, clears her throat. “Or, you know. If she doesn’t.”

The unspoken wraps around Leonie’s words like the ribbon she’d bound the flowers with. Claude hears it loud and clear, and nods. Wonders, for a moment, whether a hand on the shoulder would be appropriate; a few kind words to lay on top of the grief he now knows— slightly more about.

But Leonie shakes off her reverie and clicks her boots. He’s half-tempted to crack a joke about her making a mess, if only to make her look, because _of course_ she’d cleaned the soles before walking inside from the snow; but he drops that, too.

“Thanks, Leonie,” he says instead. She offers him a quick smile, as blunt and no-nonsense as the rest of her.

“And whatever it is you’re doing with these ledgers,” she says, “I’ve told the cooks that everything goes through me. So don’t even think about it, von Riegan.”

He dons his best expression of wounded innocence. “Just what wicked things are you expecting me to cook up?”

“You think you’re sneaky,” Leonie mutters, shaking her head, and Claude grins at her. “You’re not sneaky, Claude.”

“Hey, _now_ I’m _hurt_ —”

“See you at council meeting, schemer,” Leonie says, clicking the door behind her, and he thinks he hears a chuckle to match his own on the other side of the doorway.

He inhales the valerian. The flowers are dry, gathered before the snowfall, preserved with a capable and caring hand. It’s so well-prepared that for a moment, the pragmatist in him suggests shoving it into his stash of ingredients and gathering some fresh flowers from the greenhouse; but then he dismisses the thought as his mind strays to Byleth.

Byleth, emerging out of the shadows not three months ago, the tips of her sleeves wet and muddied, as if she’d left her cloak at the riverside for all of those five years. The steps beating against the stony floor of the Goddess Tower. Her expression, soft and surprised, as though _he_ were the unexpected one.

As though _he_ were the one who the continent grieved, all of them blind to the fact that _he_ had made a promise.

Time stuttered, apparently, where it came to her; and she is unchanged, everything about her is just the same as he left it, down to those ridiculous lacy tights. And Claude doesn’t know quite how to feel about it. Because between her, the Golden Deer, and their reclaiming of the monastery, this is turning into something very much like one of his vivid dream-recollections: the outline of the past drawing itself in ghostly contouring on the real, solid things. The past, within which he risked it all and asked a question _._

And, when he wrestled her down into the little shallow river, fallen on his knees above her, giddy with laughter, but also some deeper happiness tying itself around the vault of his ribcage to hold his heart – she answered with a promise.

Apparently only a few short months ago, for her. For him, it has been five years.

Five years of holding onto it while the world around him fractured to pieces. If he had held the Alliance together all that time, then that promise has held _him_ together, the much-needed glue of hope for a turn of fortune. Certainly when he had to sic Gloucester and Edmund on each other while mending things between Riegan and Ordelia, and hoping to all heavens Nader was resourceful enough to occupy the Gonerils without truly crippling their armies. And he—

Claude is no longer a starstruck eighteen-year-old. He is, has always been, a gambling man. Throwing himself whole into a scheme, into a high-risk-high reward battle strategy, onto a Fódlan-bound ship, into a pipe dream of a plan: that is his nature and his thrill. Five years later, he is confident enough in himself to see it clearly, both for the advantages and pitfalls of his own natural inclination. He likes to think he’s grown more reasoned. Lighter on his feet. No less coy with danger, perhaps, but with a keener eye on the exits. 

But the truth of it is— the recklessness of his Academy years burns in his veins whenever he sees her.

And therein lies the crux of the problem, something that had Nader fussing over him for five years with frankly insulting pitying concern. Even if Claude holds no faith in his breast for the Fódlani goddess, or what the Church of Seiros presents her as – he _believes_ Byleth, and believes _in_ Byleth, ardently and illogically enough to have built the entire architecture of his plans with her as foundation. And this— all of this— has not changed a whit since he’d been basing his strategies of the Battle of Eagle and Lion around the reach of the Sword of the Creator.

She is his victory. She is—

She is more than that.

She’s given him a promise, and kept it.

He slinks out of the command quarters – adapted from the old professorial wing, because Lorenz would be _damned_ before sleeping in his old dormitory bedroom again, he’d said, _like a seventeen-year-old cadet_ with _stable duty_ – and out into the courtyard. Fresh snow crunches underfoot as he strides towards the gates of the monastery. He’s thankful for Judith’s providence; she had sent for his winter robes from Derdriu, and that is truly the only reason Claude is not presently turning into a tactician-shaped icicle. Snowflakes glide star-like in the air between the visible puffs of his breath, catch on the fine hairs of his fur collar.

An instinct pulls him towards the forest, now bare under the thick layer of snow. The trail is impossible to distinguish in the knee-deep drifts, and so he wades through gracelessly, the toes of his boots catching on each root and thicket. He should have flown; although the temperature in the sky would likely be enough to make not just an icicle, but an elegant ball-appropriate ice sculpture out of him.

Something catches on his sleeve; an edge of a long, gnarly branch. Claude’s gaze follows it up, onto the fallen poplar tree wherefrom it extends; a recent fall, enough for the green on the branches to still shine defiantly under the snow.

His lip twitches with the recklessness of an Academy boy, and he reaches out to pull a green twig from between the crunched branches of poplar.

He deposits his spoils carefully within his sleeve, and soldiers on.

Byleth stands on the cliff at the edge of the forest, looking at the town sprawling below, pale and still in the light of early morning. Her sight eases something in his chest, a fraction of breath always held tight unless she is within sight; there’s a part of him that still does not quite believe her return.

“Hey, Teach,” he calls, and even he can hear the fond note in his voice. “Mind if I intrude on your alone time?”

“Well,” she rasps without turning, “when you put it like this—”

“Too late,” he says, traipsing to her side through the snow. When she turns to give him a half-hearted feign of a glare, red nose and pink lips over a sprawl of grey fur, he is almost knocked breathless.

Her _eyes_ – her inhuman goddess eyes. In the morning, there’s an eerie lightness to them, something that reminds him instantly of the sea at dawn: when the navy of the sea lights up with sun’s golden glow, its rays at an angle sharp enough to cut through the waves. Lit up to ever-transparent green, the waves splash into radiant foam – high enough to slap him, carelessly slung across the side of the ship in the hopes to see better, squarely across the face.

It’s how he feels now: jolted, fresh, salt burning at the corners of his eyes.

“A penny for your thoughts?” he offers, his tongue feeling thick and clumsy in his mouth, when the pause begins to linger. “No bargaining, though. With as many troops as we have in the monastery right now, a penny’s just about what I can afford.”

Byleth smiles, softly, and he is a damned man. “A privilege of a headache.”

“My favourite kind.” Claude takes a half-step forward until their shoulders knock against each other. Snowfall swirls around them, light and gentle in the dispersed overcast light. “Question stands, though. What are you thinking about, my friend?”

Byleth exhales. He can see the way it melts the snowflakes that fall into it; and he is melting in the same way, has melted a long time ago. All of his suspicions, his distrust, every instinct that kept him alive, sceptical of magical ladies with no obvious motive. He _trusts_ her; he trusts her with his life. He’s trusted her with _hers,_ five years and the world be damned, and he was _right._

“I don’t know,” she says very softly, eyes drawn into the airy depths ahead, “how old my father would have turned, today.”

Claude’s mind whirs.

A _problem_ he can work with; there is probably enough information lingering in the monastery and across Fódlan for him to cobble together the answer. Alois would know something, of course. The Church archives stood open to him; Seteth was hardly in a position to deny a request Claude could sell as relevant to his warfare. He could easily apply himself to offering Byleth a timeline of her father’s life.

Still, he has a sense that this is not what she’s after.

“He didn’t talk about himself a whole lot, did he?” he says instead, and he hopes it’s sympathetic enough. “For a guy so larger-than-life, he sure kept a low profile when it came to his own.”

“Sounds like someone else I know,” Byleth comments dryly, and Claude laughs. The snow swallows the sound, makes it quieter, somehow more intimate.

“No idea what you mean,” he says. “I’m an open book.”

“In three different ciphers,” Byleth says, quiet enough for it to be a whisper. He cranes his head down to catch the words, his smile aching in his chest. If it is sincerity she craves, well— Claude is not best-prepared on _that_ front, but he may just as well try.

“Hey,” he says. “So I’ve known this... habitual truth-omitter once. Maybe he was a little like your father.”

Byleth looks up, blinks slowly. Claude swallows tight.

“So— maybe he did intend to tell you the truth, eventually,” he says, keeping his voice forcibly light. “Perhaps there was some danger in it at the time, or maybe it was just something he’s grown so used to concealing that being completely open didn’t feel like _him_ anymore. But that side of him that you’ve known— that wasn’t a lie, was it?”

“No,” Byleth says, and her eyes pull him in, and _heavens_ , he’ll— he’ll drown. He’ll plunge headfirst into this damned _recklessness,_ and jeopardise a plan seven years in the making.

“Leonie wanted me to give you something,” he says, with unnecessary haste, and opens his coat to reveal the dried valerian. Byleth’s eyes glimmer with watery surprise at the sight of the little petals – ever so slightly scrunched despite his best efforts, but still sweet-smelling. She takes a soft, broken breath, and for a single icy moment Claude fears that he has done something horrifyingly wrong—

But then her small, cold hands close around the bouquet. She brings the flowers to her face, dried pink next to the liveliness of her lips, and inhales unsteadily. Her eyes flutter shut.

When she opens them again, there’s a sheen of tears around her eyelashes.

“Thank you,” she breathes, and Claude’s splintered heart could just as well shatter then and there.

“Thank Leonie,” he says, somehow. “I’m but a messenger.”

“He used to give them to me,” says Byleth. Underneath her grey fur collar, her throat bobs with a swallow. “Every birthday— every occasion. His birthdays as well. I never knew why, but then, when we arrived at the monastery... he put them on my mother’s grave too. Said they were her favourites. And since I never said, he just assumed they were my favourite, too.”

Claude lowers his eyes. His chest aches with the absence of her, but the comfort he has to offer is vacuous - a little insignificant thing. His own losses are negligible. Faced against a daughter’s grief, and the grieved man’s own mourning, he reaches out into the depths of his own frame of reference and finds— the dull ache of his grandfather’s passing.

He was something precious, he understands, to that old man; something that the duke himself would never admit. Something shrewdly and unlikely plucked out of another world to further a political agenda, but more than that, too. The depth of it never reached him, not until the moment he followed a funeral barge along the weeping violins, until he took the Derdriu ring the old man had had fashioned specifically for him before his death, and read the inscription within it before tossing it into the lagoon:

_Beloved, widowed of Riegan, do accept Riegan in his stead._

“You were very dear to him,” he says. “A blind man would have seen it.”

“Do you think,” Byleth asks, her voice impossibly small as she reaches out, traps his hand with hers, and he is frozen with more than Fódlan’s ridiculous weather— “he could tell the truth, in the end?”

“Your father?” Claude asks, like the fool he is. Byleth shakes her head softly.

“Your friend,” she says. “The... _habitual truth-omitter_.”

Claude laughs under his breath, even as his heart hammers in his chest. The two halves of it, one now firmly tethered to the ground below him, Fódlan’s chill and the quietness of the snow before them. To the name that his mother had suggested, and he took on without a particular care. To the antler-adorned doorway of the palace, _his_ palace—

And then the other half heart yearning for the world on the other side of the mountains, across the glittering sprawl of the sea. The warmth resting on his bare skin, as he unfurled scrolls after scrolls of old script illuminated with carmine and saffron, rolling in and out of the shadow of the magnificent ash tree in the cloistered courtyard.

How does he— put it into words? The chasm across his heart, the true, deep-rooted, _selfish_ desire driving his ambition of a unified world? To be one – whole – unbroken?

But Byleth is looking at him, looking _though_ him, with that deep disarming gaze that has always revealed nothing and found everything. The pause is dragging on, lingering, thickening to something meaningful, and he is seconds away from breaking it with a defensive quip when Byleth says, “I think he could.”

Claude smiles around the knot in his throat. “I suppose,” he says, “if you could ever forgive your father for keeping your secrets, even my friend’s future doesn’t look too bleak.”

A cold hand reaches for his cheek.

Claude goes very still as calloused fingertips curl around the edge of his jaw, little finger resting lightly against his burning cheekbone. His eyes flutter closed, snowflakes melting on his parted lips. The wind rises, swirling around them.

Something he would not have allowed for himself, not yet. But—

“If _this_ is true,” Byleth says, very softly, “then I can take not knowing for a little longer.”

The voice Claude finds in the depth of his chest is not the voice he normally uses.

“It’s true,” he says, and the hand on his cheek quivers. “On my mother’s life. On my own. On yours— Byleth, _this_ is true.”

She watches him, the ruddiness colouring her cheeks growing deeper, and her eyes grow ever more striking for it. And then Claude has a realisation: one he should have really had a long time ago.

Her eyes, her goddess’s eyes, are the sea.

The sea, stretching between Nasashir and Derdriu, its horizon swallowing both of his homes. Lapping at his feet at the royal harbour, winding itself in between the townhouses and under arching bridges, pushing the ships across the surface from one to the other. A divider— a _connection._ A ring dropped into the depths.

“Claude,” Byleth whispers, and he leans his cheek into her touch.

“We’ll make a new world together, Teach, eh?” he says, and his lips brush the inside of her palm.

Faint enough for it to be the wind, Byleth says, “ _Make the heavens anew.”_

He laughs into her hand. And she laughs, too; and _gods,_ if this pained world of war and loss and so very much grief could still contain _this_ – the snow, the crushed sweet-smelling flowers, and his terrible teenage poetry that somehow, _somehow_ she remembers as something precious – then surely he had not been a fool to grab this hope with both his hands and never let go.

The little twig scrapes along his wrist as he offers Byleth his elbow. “Snowstorm’s coming,” he says. “Would you do me the honour of being escorted back to the monastery, Your Grace?”

Byleth scoffs and punches him in the forearm instead. Claude swallows a squeak. “Keep up,” is all she says before sauntering forward, ploughing through the knee-high snow with as much effort as he would spare for a beach stroll.

“Is this a challenge, my friend?” he calls after her.

“Only if you want to lose,” a faint answer reaches him from between the trees, and Claude wastes no more breath on _talking._

*

Leonie is unimpressed when he presents her with a burning orange-red fox mask.

“As I said, Claude,” she says, eyes flitting across the remaining menagerie of a mask collection seated across his desk: a golden-grey bear, a graceful greenish hare, a hook-beaked white eagle with purple eyes, a wholly violet, extravagant butterfly, a venomously pink version of a wyvern snout, and a sky-blue dove with silver-dotted cheeks– “you’re not as sneaky as you think you are.”

“Does that mean that you forgive me for, and I quote—” Claude flips through a mental encyclopaedia of insults levelled at his head, “ _being inordinately wasteful with the few resources we have to spare?_ ”

“ _No_ ,” Leonie says, with feeling. Then she sighs, deflating visibly, and palms the sequins of the mask with a fondness that is almost against herself. “But you’re right that morale has been low. And this is, after all, the Alliance territory now. Even in our village we knew that there’s no winter without a masquerade.”

“Exactly,” Claude tells her, slotting his own mask on. “So, just for the night— there’s no war, right? And _you’re_ the Master Tactician, and _I’m_ in charge of the kitchen budget—”

“ _Don’t push it, von Riegan_ ,” Leonie warns, and Claude grins. As if this were the night to do anything but. The night of the opposites, his grandfather had explained during the first year, and even in theory Claude loved the idea of it: the night of fool becoming king and king serving his fool, of shadow turning into light and light into shadow, of fanciful imaginations coming to life to fill the night with spectres and wonders.

He thinks the old man would appreciate it, in his own dry way, that Claude chooses to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death with something as close to joy and carefree fun as the war allows.

 _Opposites joining_ , he thinks, darting his way through Garreg Mach, _masks sliding on, masks sliding off_ —

The celebrations are different, of course, and not only for the lack of water underneath, no shimmer of reflected lights or passing boats. It’s— cheaper, its colours muted and overwhelmingly brown, bonfires burning on the courtyards of the monastery as opposed to Derdriu’s whimsical lanterns, the masks of townsfolk, troops, and knights made out of cheap cloth and string; they have distributed as many as they could, and left the rest in the hands of enterprising celebratory ingenuity. The climate’s different too, colder, snowfall melting over the bonfires. This is perhaps the furthest north Claude has seen the Derdriu masquerade.

But there is food, even if not much and not fancy; and there is drink, and music, and light. And slowly the festival begins to hum around him, stirring his blood with familiar pounding.

He dances with Lysithea, all but throwing her in the air in a wholly improper manoeuvre that leaves her in squealing, sputtering outrage and – he grins – delight; he dances with _Lorenz_ and does much of the same, avoiding the wicked-sharp heels aimed at his toes. He dances with Raphael and _he_ is the one being tossed, and he lets out a breathless cry of joy as the ground spins beneath him; for a moment, he is just one more fleck of frost falling to the earth.

But what catches him is not Raphael’s lumberjack embrace, it’s a pair of smaller, wiry arms, and the deer-masked Byleth _laughs_ at his mouth falling open, her thin, reedy chuckles all but drowning in the music. He reaches out for her, but she eases him off on the ground a second before, and they stumble against each other for a moment, chest against chest—

“Professor!” booms Alois behind them, and Claude whispers a very deliberate curse beneath his breath. Byleth laughs at him again and pulls away, towards Alois’s waiting arms. “May I have this dance?”

He turns and faces Hilda. In her pink mask, all spikes and polished edges of her own resin handiwork, she looks vaguely terrifying – less a wyvern and more a fable-born dragon. He extends his hand anyway, and she takes it, stepping closer to rap her knuckles against his own shielded forehead.

“And what’s _that_ supposed to be?” she says. Claude chuckles, twirling her under their joined arms. The masquerade flows around them in flashes of movement, masked faces painted red and gold of the fire, embers crackling, sparks dancing. There are no feathers, no fanciful costumes; but it doesn’t matter as long as it’s the night of opposites. No war, no grief.

“A demon,” he says, and he _feels_ the glare Hilda levels at him. Less at the mask itself and more at the fact that he hadn’t asked her to make it, he thinks. “Appropriate, hmm?”

“ _Stupid,_ ” Hilda says, and twirls him in turn. The world blurs into a series of flashing lights. “When you gave the Professor the deer, I thought you wanted something _cool_ for yourself. This is not some kind of self-deprecating joke, is it? Or— what, a secret message?”

“Hey, look,” he teases, and scoops her off the ground. “Tonight you’re the brains, and I’m the brawn.”

Hilda drapes herself over him in a princess hold, her vivid hair flowing across his shoulder. “Just because I don’t flaunt it at every turn— _oh!_ ”

He tosses her into the sky, a glorious blaze of hot pink, and laughs at the sound she makes as he catches her.

The night stretches into a dreamscape, bonfires burning and his vision narrowing until there is just one thing he searches for. And she is damnably out of reach, hands clasped on Flayn’s in a wild Enbarr polka; then with Seteth, and the man’s leaning towards her, whispering something serious which has Claude’s patience somewhat tested; then with Shamir, and their dance is more combat than the thing proper, sharp and unadorned and mercenary. Then the Deer claim her, first Lysithea, then, shockingly, Marianne; and then Claude is pulled into a circle of arms clasped around each other, familiar eyes laughing behind the masks. They’re laughing, and he’s laughing, even as the sound catches in his throat just slightly and for a terrifying moment verges on the paper-thin edge of a sob; and then he remembers that he is _masked,_ he may do as he pleases.

But then the circle splinters, reorganises itself into couples and triplets as the music evolves into another song, and Claude seizes his chance.

He catches Byleth’s arm, his gloves digging through the thick sleeve to seek out her warmth. She goes willingly as he pulls her along, slinking along the edges of the merriment to find a shadowed cloister close to their former classroom. Byleth’s eyes glisten beneath the holes of her mask, waiting.

He lets go, his heart in his throat.

“Hey, Teach,” he says. She only tilts her head at him, and he cannot help but step back, steeling himself for the execution of the plan that pounds in his temples. “You know the best thing about the Derdriu masquerade?”

She makes a soft, questioning sound in her throat. Claude takes it as his cue to get on with it. “Two things, actually. One— masks, of course. Those famous masks. And the other, well, my grandfather was very fond of this being the night of opposites. That’s why you’re the deer, you see, and I’m the Ashen Demon—”

“Claude,” Byleth says, and takes a half-step towards him. But he cannot stop his mouth now, he _cannot,_ because if he doesn’t muster the courage _now,_ then the next occasion will be— well, to be terribly frank, he’s not quite sure he’ll survive until then. There will be a Fódlan to unify, his brothers to reckon with.

“—and that you’re Alliance, even though heavens only know which country here could really claim you, if any, and I’m— well—“ he gestures to his face, grey and horned and with a hint of more faces lurking at the edges of the mask, laughs, and swallows it all down, “—Alliance that I am, you may know this as a famous Almyran motif.”

The silence that falls after that rings in his ears. The masquerade grows muted, the world shrinking to the shadowed cloister.

“Since, you know,” he adds, not bearing her silence any longer, “it’s the night to lie— to wear a mask—”

Byleth kisses him.

He folds his arms around her on instinct, stepping back with a faint strangled sound. Her lips are warm, impossibly warm in the falling snow, and she is— he _knows_ who she is, by now, the cleaver of mountains, and this world’s only damned chance for unification, and this impossibly grand creature that has somehow elected to walk his path -- and now she knows who _he_ is, too, and the thought is as terrifying as it is exhilarating.

_I will always be by your side._

He yields his mouth to her entirely, and she kisses him like— like he is the sun. Like she is _cold,_ somehow, despite the blazing flames burning beneath her breast, and he is her only way of ever thawing out. Like he’s waking her up. Pulling her away out of the lonely perch from where she regards humanity, and into the pool of their own little worlds and worries and joys; and into a colourful whirlwind of fancies and passions and not-quite-truths, which, if she only wanted to squint, could turn—

“Happy night of the opposites,” whispers Byleth into his mouth. “To both of you.”

Claude stills, as if snared, watching her with wide eyes. He does not dare breathe.

“Don’t you mean,” his foolish mouth says _,_ “have a _terrible_ night of the opposites—”

“That,” Byleth says, unruffled, and kisses him again.

It is as if she had thrust a hand inside his chest, and _twisted_. The blaze of pain and relief that jolts him like a set shoulder: something wrenched, pulled out of its socket to dangle inertly for years on end, and then set upright through a single moment of agony.

_Both of you._

And his little halved heart, splintered and aching and painful with swelling tenderness, for the first time in six years beats out an even rhythm.

He pulls the twig out of his sleeve. The berries on the mistletoe had wilted somewhat over the last weeks, but the few leaves clinging to the stem are still defiantly green – the measure of his recklessness, of just how deeply he’s been willing to plunge. With a flourish, he holds it over their heads, and presses his other arm against her back to pull her closer.

“Kiss me again,” he says, and Byleth laughs.

One more promise, just to be safe. Twice always; twice an eternity, and maybe he’s greedy to demand this secure a guarantee, but he’s also the embodiment of distrust.

The snow falls thick and quiet beyond the cloisters, the masquerade blazing around the bonfires. And far across the courtyard, Leonie and Hilda clink their tankards in a wordless toast.

> Quando ritto il doge antico  
> Su l’antico bucentauro  
> L’anel d’oro dava al mar,  
> E vedeasi, al fiato amico  
> De la grande sposa cerula,  
> Il crin bianco svolazzar;  
>   
> Sorrideva nel pensiero  
> Ne le fronti a’ padri tremuli  
> De’ forti anni la virtú,  
> E gittava un guardo altero,  
> Muta, a l’onde, al cielo, a l’isole,  
> La togata gioventú.
> 
> Giosuè Carducci, _Le nozze del mare_

**Author's Note:**

> ... I wrote it in a single day and I am so insanely giddy with all of it. CAN'T WAIT TO HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS.
> 
> Oh, and if you haven't read the prequel to it, here is it: [Reaching Out, Sunlit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24555196)
> 
> [Yell at me on Twitter!](https://twitter.com/wearwind_ao3)


End file.
